Former Israeli Shin Bet officer, Michael Kubi, revealed that he knows the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, "better than his mother," as he spent about 180 hours with him during interrogations while Sinwar was in Israeli prisons. Kubi stated in an interview with CNN, "I asked Sinwar, you are now 28-29 years old (at the time), why are you not married? How do you not want a family? He replied that Hamas is his wife, Hamas is his child, and Hamas is everything to him."
Analysts say that Sinwar, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 2021, will not be easy to kill this time and is considered one of the main targets in the Israeli war in Gaza. Hussein Abed Al-Hussein from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said in a statement to CNN: "Sinwar is to Israel what bin Laden was to America, and just as America hunted bin Laden down and eventually got to him, I believe the Israelis will do the same, and this war will not end until they can get him."
Abed Al-Hussein continued: "If anyone is passing information to Israel, it is Sinwar; he typically knows who the collaborators are and eliminates them before the Israelis can reach him."
It is worth noting that Yahya Sinwar was convicted of killing two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians in 1988 for collaborating with Israel and spent two decades in an Israeli prison. He is considered the founder of Hamas's internal security force and aggressively pursued all alleged collaborators. He was released along with more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held hostage in Gaza for five years.
